I have a question regarding a couple of the attributes in the GENTECH Genealogical Data Model at... https://www.ngsgenealogy.org/ngsgentech/projects/Gdm/Gdm.cfm I am looking at the two attributes ASSERTION.Value (p. 47) and CHARACTERISTIC-PART.Characteristic-Part-Name (p. 50). Can someone explain (and possibly give examples) of the differences between the two? I guess what is confusing me is that the brief example in the description of ASSERTION.Value on p. 47 seems to be at odds with another more detailed example on p. 34. [[In an attempt to alleviate the boredom of winter, I am trying to design my own physical implementation of the GENTECH Genealogical Data Model. I need to get a life...]] Thanks, -- Dennis

Dennis wrote: > I have a question regarding a couple of the attributes in the GENTECH > Genealogical Data Model at... > > https://www.ngsgenealogy.org/ngsgentech/projects/Gdm/Gdm.cfm > > I am looking at the two attributes ASSERTION.Value (p. 47) and > CHARACTERISTIC-PART.Characteristic-Part-Name (p. 50). Can someone > explain (and possibly give examples) of the differences between the two? > > I guess what is confusing me is that the brief example in the > description of ASSERTION.Value on p. 47 seems to be at odds with another > more detailed example on p. 34. > > [[In an attempt to alleviate the boredom of winter, I am trying to > design my own physical implementation of the GENTECH Genealogical Data > Model. I need to get a life...]] > > Thanks, > As far as I can see the purpose of a CHARACTERISTIC would be to enable a single ASSERTION to have multiple values (note the lower case "v"!). "If the ASSERTION is about a characteristic like a person’s name, there will be one CHARACTERISTIC for one to many CHARACTERISTIC-PARTs. If the characteristic is occupation, for example, there will be one CHARACTERISTIC-PART." If there is only a single value then this could equally well be stored in the ASSERTION.Value but if there are multiple values then they will be held in a series of CHARACTERISTIC-PART.Characteristic-Part-Names. (ISTM that Characteristic-Part-Value would be better terminology) Whilst the simple example has a single CHARACTERISTIC-PART a name might have more, for instance one with a Characteristic-Part-Type-Name of FirstName and one with a Characteristic-Part-Type-Name of LastName with respective Characteristic-Type-Names of John and Smith respectively. I doubt I'd have modeled it in that way myself. For one thing, why separate CHARACTERISTIC-PART-TYPE out into a single entity? I'd tend to have a data type to represent a name/value pair. From a modeling perspective I'd then make ASSERTION.Value a list of such pairs. -- Ian Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard at nildram co uk